Cheese Ritz must have vanished from the market shelves decades ago, and I hadn't thought of them in years until I realized that the hunk of Monterey Jack in my refrigerator had been sitting there quite a while and that I'd better use it up before it got mouldy. I ate some with a few regular Ritz crackers, and it brought to mind the Cheese Ritz-based lunches of my early childhood, and made me wonder whatever became of Cheese Ritz.
The last time I thought of Cheese Ritz I didn't have the Internets, but now I can Google it, so that's what I did. It seems that practically nobody on the Internets remembers Cheese Ritz. After several pages of Google results, I'd found references only to things such as Ritz Bits with cheese (not at all the same thing,) recipes that use both cheese and Ritz crackers, and something called Ritz Cheese Flavour Crackers, which are available in the UK and Ireland.
I don't think the English Cheese Flavoured Ritz crackers are the same thing as the historic Cheese Ritz, though. The picture of the English Ritz shows something that looks pretty much the same color as an ordinary Ritz cracker, and I recall the Cheese Ritz of my childhood being darker, almost the color of chedder, like Cheeze-Its or Cheese Nips. They were way better than those smaller snack crackers, though, as they had the flaky texture characteristic of regular Ritz crackers.
The absence of any references to Cheese Ritz on the Internet made me wonder if perhaps I'd imagined them, and had developed a false memory out of some subconscious wish for a really good cheese flavored cracker. Given the Internet's plethora of nostalgia-based web sites, it seemed strange that something which looms so large in my early memories would be entirely absent from the web.
Finally, I thought to switch to Google image search, and this came up. The package is not quite like those I remember, but then it dates from the 1970s, some twenty years later. It's nice to know that the Internet provides proof of their existence after all, but I remain puzzled as to why there is so little about them. Perhaps most of those who would remember them have died of buttery-cheese-flavored-cracker-related coronary disease.